Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama

Jahn, Manfred.

New Literary History, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001, pp. 659-679 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2001.0037

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v032/32.3jahn01.html

Access Provided by Universitaetsbibliothek Frankfurt a.M at 10/13/12 11:56AM GMT

Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama

Manfred Jahn
Im not a theorist. I am not an authoritative or reliable commentator on the dramatic scene, the social scene, any scene. I write plays, when I can manage it, and thats all. Thats the sum of it. So Im speaking with some reluctance, knowing that there are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement, depending on where you are standing at the time or on what the weathers like. A categorical statement, I nd, will never stay where it is and be nite. It will immediately be subject to modication by the other twenty-three possibilities of it.1

I. A Note on Method

peaking on the occasion of the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962, Harold Pinter presents a pointedly personal statement and at the same time rides a barely hidden attack against theory. Drama theorists, Pinter alleges, may think they know what they are doing, but they are actually prone to pronouncing categorical statements based on contingent positions. Once one acknowledges all the possibilities, however, as Pinter does on his part, it is easy to get lost in the multifacetedness of modern reality. I believe this is an accurate representation of the dilemma that threatens both literary theory and interpretive practice. But does this mean that these enterprises are doomed to failure? Hopefully, this is not necessarily so. Oddly enough, Pinters dilemma is explicitly addressed in statistical theory, and perhaps there is an interdisciplinary lesson to be learned here. In statistics, the validity of a hypothesis depends on an assessment of the dangers of accepting or rejecting it, and on setting suitable error tolerances. There are two prominent errors: (1) to accept a hypothesis as right when it is wrong (given a fuller set of data), and (2) to reject a hypothesis as false when it is actually true.2 Of course, truth and falsehood are not so easily accessible in the literary eld, and literary theory in particular has to rely on argumentative values such as plausibility, face validity, efciency, and productivity. In principle, however, the
New Literary History, 2001, 32: 659679

660

new literary history

statistical precept applies. Methodologically, then, this paper will assess the relative costs and merits of interpretive hypotheses and attempt to construct a plausible, consistent, and position-conscious conceptual framework which explains more phenomena more adequately.3 The specic question I am addressing is whether and to what extent drama, like epic narrative, admits of the narratological concepts of a narrating instance or a narrative voice. Heeding Pinters critique, I will rst make an attempt to situate myself within a range of competing approaches to drama (section two). Section three tackles the voice issue by discussing traditional speech-act accounts of drama. Finally, section four reviews Seymour Chatmans argument for a show-er narrator and begins a tentative investigation of voice and other signs of the narrating4 both in the dramatic text and in the dramatic performance. Complementing to some extent Brian Richardsons project in this issue and in earlier articles,5 the overall aim is to prepare the ground for a narratology of drama.

II. Situating Oneself

In order to address the rst of Pinters charges, let us accept that every modern critic and theorist must identify and question his or her position. The most natural way of doing this is to associate onself with what Stanley Fish calls an interpretive community, a move that often also amounts to dissociating oneself from other interpretive communities.6 The basic idea is that it is only by balancing competing beliefs that one can take a stand and meaningfully contribute to the issues, politics, and agendas of ones discipline. Of course, any one person can belong to several communities, and each community is likely to break down into several subcommunities. One can be a structuralist or a poststructuralist, one may be interested in the production side or the reception side of a work, one can see the world of artistic forms from any number of aesthetic ismsrealism, impressionism, modernism, postmodernism, and so forth. The number of positions is large indeed, and the number of intersecting positions is larger still. For our present purpose, let us focus on three reception-oriented theories of drama. There is only one truth that is accepted by all three theories, and that is that plays come in two forms or realizations, texts and performances. The divisions and contentions arise in the wake of this axiom, giving rise to questions of terminology, preference, focus, relevance, priority, and privilege. For convenience, the three interpretive approaches will be labeled Poetic Drama, Theater Studies, and Reading Drama, respectively.

narrative voice and agency in drama

661

(1) The school of Poetic Drama roundly prioritizes the dramatic text. Reading the text is regarded as a uniquely rewarding experience, particularly when set against the shortcomings of actual performances. Poetic Dramas main interpretive strategy is a close reading which aims at bringing out the dramatic works full aesthetic quality and richness. Points on its agenda are a general critique and dislike of actors, audiences, and theatrical institutions (expressly including the Renaissance public theaters). Buzzwords and catchphrases include poetic drama, dramatic poetry, drama as literature, theater in the mind, inferior to the original, and so forth. The author of the following testimonial is playwright Eugene ONeill: I hardly ever go to the theater . . . although I read all the plays I can get. I dont go to the theater because I can always do a better production in my mind. . . . Is not Hamlet, seen in the dream theater of the imagination as one reads, a greater play than Hamlet interpreted even by a perfect production?7 (2) The school of Theater Studies, by contrast, privileges the performance over the text. A plays text is accepted as something that is intended to be performed, but the performed play is really the only relevant and worthwhile form of the genre. The main interpretive strategies of this approach include considering a performance as the product of historical and cultural theatrical conditions, describing the sociology of drama, analyzing stage codes and semiotics, stage histories, and the dynamics of collaborative authorship. Points on the agenda are establishing a distinctive discipline and attacking Poetic Drama for its academic isolatedness. A typical catchphrase is a plays coming to life in performance. Here is a testimonial by a playwright anticipating the project:
Although the dramatist may also be a man of letters, capable of producing novels, poems, essays, criticism, I believe that drama is not simply a branch of literature but a separate little art, with its own peculiar values and technicalities. (And one day, if I am spared, I hope to deal with this subject at some length, if only as a protest against the nonsense often offered us by literary professors and lecturers who write about the drama without understanding the Theatre.) I hope that the plays in this volume can be enjoyed by a reader, but I must stress the fact that they were not written to be read but to be played in theatres, where if properly produced and acted they come alive. A play that has never found a theatre, actors, audiences, is not really a play at all. A dramatist is a writer who works in and for the Theatre.8

Had John Priestley actually written that essay on drama as a separate art (and one notes he already writes theater with a capital T) it would probably have become one of Theater Studies foundational texts. As it

662

new literary history

is, J. L. Styans Drama, Stage and Audience (1975) is usually taken to articulate the disciplines programmatic views.9 (3) Finally, Reading Drama is a school that envisages an ideal recipient who is both a reader and a theatergoera reader who appreciates the text with a view to possible or actual performance, and a theatergoer who (re)appreciates a performance through his or her knowledge (and rereading) of the text. Its interpretive strategies include performance-oriented textual analysis, paying particular attention to the secondary text of the stage directions,10 and comparing the reading of plays to the reading of novels. Points on its agenda include the rehabilitation of the text as a piece of literature, and the promotion of a cross-disciplinary exchange between critics, theorists, and theater practitioners. A typical catchphrase is virtual performance;11 programmatic textbooks include Keir Elams The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980) and Manfred Psters The Theory and Analysis of Drama (1984), and there is also a recent collection of essays entitled Reading Plays, edited by Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland.12 The following passage may serve as a testimonial: Krapps Last Tape shares the formal ambiguity of all dramas: it is at once a text to be read and reread and a guide for live performance. . . . Indeed, the readers awareness of a potential performance partially constitutes the texts meaning; if we are to make sense of the play, we must read with especially active visual imagination.13 The foregoing survey emplots three approaches to drama theory as the dialectic stages of a Fichtean thesis-antithesis-synthesis cycle. Accepting Stanley Fishs premise that the beliefs of an interpretive community determine what counts as a fact as well as what is central, peripheral, and worthy of being noticed (IT 337), both literary criticism and theory are here accepted as being largely rhetorical in nature. As Fish claims, literary critics are perpetually in the business of validating and reinforcing current community beliefs, often also of persuading members of other interpretive communities to join the club (IT 16). Bearing in mind the relativity thus introduced, the present writer roundly embraces the beliefs of Reading Drama. Not only is Reading Drama the most circumspect of the three schools surveyed, it also explicitly supports the present essays own agenda of bringing narratology to bear on the theory and analysis of plays. As for my position within narratology itself, I consider myself a member of the community of cognitively oriented postclassical discourse narratologists.14 Although I have isolated only three, not twenty-four, positions on drama, we are clearly already looking at a version of the Pinterian world picture. What we have before us is a large and heterogeneous corpus of objects (dramatic texts, virtual and real dramatic performances); we are

narrative voice and agency in drama

663

confronted with a wide range of largely contradictory approaches and responses that all seem more or less right or wrong under specic community perspectives. And yet, as far as I can see, recognition of the multiplicity of the phenomenon clears the air rather than incapacitates the project. Indeed, surveying the available options, we are in a better position to assess their relative strengths and weaknesses.

III. Speech-act Theories of Drama

As is well known, speech-act theory treats sentences and texts as pragmatically situated acts performed by speakers addressing hearers. It makes no difference to a speech-act theorist if the speaker is a writer or if the hearer is a readerthe contexts may be slightly different, but the speech acts are considered to be identical. For drama, too, a number of theorists and authors assume that the text straightforwardly issues from an authorial Superspeaker with a perceptible voice of his or her own (DP 3). As Edward Albee puts it, I cut my plays because I overwrite. I get infatuated with the sound of my own voice and I put in all sorts of scenes and speeches that I am very fond of.15 While this view afrms the basic similarity of written and spoken texts, it is a position that is naturally contested by commentators of a deconstructionist persuasion. In a nutshell, the speech act theorists alliance of written text and audible speech nicely circumscribes the problematic of textual voice, and one has to investigate where speech-act theory leads us in this matter. The accounts to be scrutinized in the following are those of John Austin, John R. Searle, Richard Ohmann, and Grard Genette.16 One might as well say at the outset that drama generally plays second ddle in these accounts; often enough it is assigned the unthankful role of a foil or exception that can readily be excluded from further consideration. The speech-act theory of ction originates with John Austins incidental observations on a particular type of infelicitous pragmatic context. Noting that performative utterances are heir to certain kinds of ill (HTD 21), he observes that a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. . . . Language in such circumstances is in special waysintelligiblyused not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal useways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration (HTD 22). One doesnt have to be a card-carrying deconstructionist to recognize the impact of Austins exclusionary gesture, his privileging of normal circumstances,17 and the marginalization and disqualication of

664

new literary history

what does not t the language philosophers current focus of interest. From todays perspective, whether deconstructionist or not, all of Austins points beg the question, indeed, they invite the positions they so explicitly exclude. Far from leading to kinds of ills or etiolations, the ability of language to deal with nonserious, imaginary, or hypothetical scenarios is now generally accepted as crucially indicative of human thinking, cognition, and linguistic competence itself.18 Recognizing Austins patchy treatment of ctional utterances, Searle initiates a closer inquiry into what he terms the logical status of ctional discourse. Analyzing the beginning of Iris Murdochs novel The Red and the Green, Searle argues that the author cannot be held accountable for the truth of the texts assertive statements. Instead, suspending the rules of reference and sincerity that apply in serious or real-world utterances, the author of a work of ction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary acts, normally of the representative type (TLS 325). Having established this formula (which conspicuously haunts all subsequent accounts), Searle then briey turns to what he terms two special cases, rst-person narratives and theatrical plays. In rst-person ction such as Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes stories the author is not in fact pretending to make assertions, he is pretending to be John Watson (TLS 328). As for drama, it is not so much the author who is doing the pretending but the characters in the actual performance; in other words, the author of the play is not in general pretending to make assertions; he is giving directions as to how to enact a pretense which the actors then follow (TLS 328). Quoting the rst few lines (including the initial stage direction) of John Galsworthys play The Silver Box, Searle then works his way up to the famous recipe metaphor:
It is instructive to compare this passage [from Galsworthys play] with Miss Murdochs. Murdoch, I have claimed, tells us a story; in order to do that, she pretends to make a series of assertions about people in Dublin in 1916. What we visualize when we read the passage is a man pottering about his garden thinking about horses. But when Galsworthy writes his play, he does not give us a series of pretended assertions about a play. He gives us a series of directions as to how things are actually to happen on stage when the play is performed. When we read the passage from Galsworthy we visualize a stage, the curtain rises, the stage is furnished like a dining room, and so on. That is, it seems to me the illocutionary force of the text of a play is like the illocutionary force of a recipe for baking a cake. It is a set of instructions for how to do something, namely how to perform the play. (TLS 32829)

One notes how Searle moves from an account of what happens in the process of composition (when Galsworthy writes his play), to what the

narrative voice and agency in drama

665

text means when we read it, to the practical question of how to perform the play. It is easy to see that this moving focuswhich unproblematically invokes positions from both Theater Studies and Reading Dramaputs a Pinterian price on any categorical statement that issues from it, especially the pretense and the recipe formulas. Obviously enough, what is a feature of one mode of existencesay, the instruction quality of the dramatic textmay not exist as a feature of the other (the performance). Moreover, what is true of one set of recipients (readers) may not be true of another (actors). If one accepts Fishs antifoundationalist argument that it is the recipients who are a texts true makers (IT 327) the resulting problem may clearly be more serious than is apparent at rst glance. There are other weaknesses in Searles exposition of the matter. No reason is given why third-person ction should be the central phenomenon on whose ground drama and rst-person ction show up as special cases. Furthermore, one notes how the concept of nondeceptive pretense is made to serve as the common denominator of all three types of ction: in third-person narration the author pretends to recount; in rst-person narration he or she pretends to be a narrator; in plays, the actors pretend to be characters and to perform acts. Actually, the common ground is entirely slippery. If the author can pretend to be a rst-person narrator then one might well ask why she or he should be unable to pretend to be a heterodiegetic narrator. More generally speaking, if ction is to be derived from an underlying concepta big ifthen why must it be reducible to pretense and not, say, make-believe, fabrication, imitation, simulation, or impersonation? (But any of these alternatives could immediately be questioned in turn.) Finally, there are many scenarios where the pretense formula is singularly unenlightening. If Murdoch tells a story and does it by pretending to recount to us a series of events (TLS 325), then it looks as if telling amounts to pretending to tell, a paradoxical notion which complicates rather than explains things. If an actor pretends to perform . . . speech acts and other acts (TLS 328), then, strictly speaking, stage directions are not instructions to do something but to pretend to do somethinghere, too, the pretense tag can apparently be added or dropped at will. Admittedly, when a stage direction species Hamlet dies, the actor better pretend to die rather than do the real thing. Then again, when a stage direction species exit, stage left (an example we will encounter again), the actor better walk off; pretending to leave wont do. Would pretends to kiss her be realized on stage as a pretended pretense? Evidently, there is some unaccounted-for devil in the detail here. Searle also indicates that a reader who reads the initial stage direction of Galsworthys play will visualize a stage, the curtain rises, the stage is

666

new literary history

furnished like a dining room, and so on. But according to Searles own account, the text does not contain instructions to visualize this and that, but instructions for how to . . . perform the play (TLS 329). What Searle fails to notice at this point is that an ordinary reader (that is, one who is neither an actor nor a director) is rather an unsuitable addressee for the texts assumed illocutionary force. In fact, to instruct an ordinary reader how to perform the play is just as infelicitous as, say, asking an infant to prepare a dinner for four. Of course, as Patricia A. Suchy points out, actors and directors are readers, too;19 indeed, it seems sensible to say that theater practitioners read the text like ordinary readers before they read it as professionals with a view to a possible production. As readers, they will probably visualize and (lest we forget) vocalize this and that like everybody else rather than get up and do what they are apparently instructed to do. Imaginative reading, one can conclude, comes rst because it is a necessary precondition for understanding, and only then, if at all applicable (closet drama is always a troublesome exception, especially to Theater Studies), for directing and acting. Even though Searle draws attention to the imaginative basis of reading in the conclusion of his essay, he fails to establish this crucial link between imaginative reading and the preparation and execution of the performance. When Genette reopens the question of the illocutionary status of narrative ction (AOF 30), he begins by seconding many of Searles claims, including postulating third-person narrative as the general ction paradigm and reading the standard narrative sentence of epic ction as pretended assertion. Also as in Searle, rst-person narration is seen as an author pretending to be a narrator, and after briey situating both rst-person ction and drama on the sidelines, they are set aside from further consideration (AOF 31). In contradistinction to Searle, who denies the existence of ction-specic speech acts, Genette argues that ctional assertions might be explained as either or both of two indirect speech acts: (1) as directives (invitations) to join the author in imagining the ctional world, (2) as declarations creating the ctional world. In so far as Genette follows Searle, the questions and objections that were raised above can simply be reiterated: third-person ction is an entirely arbitrary paradigm that is likely to produce contingent (that is, invalid) categorical statements, and it is certainly not beyond question that an utterance that presents all the formal features of assertions but does not fulll their pragmatic conditions can only be a pretended assertion (AOF 36). Nevertheless, in his discussion of Searles comments on drama, Genette helpfully disentangles pragmatic contexts and textual modes:

narrative voice and agency in drama

667

As for stage directions . . . Searle views them as having a purely directive illocutionary status (instructions for how to do something, namely, how to perform the play). This is undoubtedly the way they are understood by actors and directors, but not necessarily by ordinary readers (as for the audience, it sees only the way the directions are executed); the reader is just as likely to see them as a description of what is going on onstage (in the ctional diegesis). A direction such as Hernani removes his coat and drapes it over the kings shoulders simultaneously describes the characters behaviour and tells the performer what to do. The authors intention is thus undecidable, here; it oscillates between description on the one hand and prescription, or direction, on the other, according to whether the author is primarily addressing a reader (as in the case of Musset) or a theatrical company (as in the case of Brecht). (AOF 32)

Even though these are all pertinent observations, one can quarrel with some of the detail. For instance, there is little point in second-guessing authorial intentions, which are never truly decidable. Also, if stage directions mean different things in different contexts then one is probably facing a multifunctional text rather than an oscillating authorial intention (I will return to Genettes analysis of Hernani removes his coat below). Finally, there is little need to bother about primary addressees because, as Genette points out, the dramatic text comfortably serves both ordinary readers, reading for pleasure, and theater practitioners, reading for work. Indeed, Genettes entirely valid point is that a dramatic text can variously address ordinary readers and/or stage practitioners and change illocutionary force in accordance with the pragmatics involved. Although this may pose a problem for speech-act theoryare we talking of different texts now?Genettes multipleaddressees hypothesis elegantly solves the problem of infelicitous context which, as we saw above, mars Searles account. In general, Genettes exposition proceeds from a categorical distinction between dramatic ction and narrative ction (AOF 33), a terminologically reied at that has serious repercussions on the question of voice and narrative agency. In Narrative Discourse Revisited,20 where the subject is treated at length, Genette maintains that there is a truly insurmountable opposition between dramatic representation and narrative (NDR 41), and he denes narrative stricto sensu as a narrative conveyed by a verbal transmission (NDR 1617). Two drastic consequences follow: (1) that drama is a nonnarrative medium lacking a narrators discourse and voice, and (2) that it is the story dimension of drama, at best, that admits of narratological analysis (NDR 16). But here, again, it pays to heed Pinters challenge and to accept that drama is a multifaceted phenomenon. It would clearly be more prudent to say that

668

new literary history

the dramatic performance is not normally predicated on a narratorial verbal transmission. Already this is only partly true of plays like Pericles, to be discussed below, and it does not necessarily mean that the dramatic text is likewise characterized by absent narratorial voice. From the point of view of Theater Studies, where everything is considered to be subordinate to and projected from the performance, it would indeed seem logical to proceed from an absent-voice premise.21 In the framework of Reading Drama, in contrast, dramatic text and dramatic performance, though clearly related, are media in their own right; hence the text need not in principle inherit the absent-voice quality that may be constitutive of the performance. In the context of this problematic, reconsider what Genette has to say on stage directions, a textual element absent in performance. Hernani removes his coat, Genette says, describes the characters behaviour (AOF 32, my emphasis). Unobjectionable as this phrasing may be, it is worth noting that description of behavior is rather a fuzzy term in narratological discourse. As established at length by Genette himself, albeit in the context of epic narrative, description constitutes a narrative pause during which story time stops. In Seymour Chatmans helpful linguistic elaboration, description is based on stasis statements typically predicated on verbs like be or have.22 However, the example cited by Genette is what Chatman terms a process statement (SD 32), an element that is part of the representation of temporally sequenced story events. In other words, Hernani removes his coat is not a descriptive but a narrative (or diegetic) statement whose enunciating subject should be a narrator, not the author. Remarkably, Genette also ignores the possibility of a narrating instance when he nally turns to thirdperson epic ction: The acts . . . whose status still remains to be dened if possible, are the speech acts that constitute . . . the narrative discourse itself: that of the author (AOF 33).23 Thus error is piled upon error. First, a diegetic statement is mistaken for a descriptive statement, and then the ultimate originator of the text, the author, is preferred to the textually manifest subject of the narrative discourse, the narrator (see Fludernik, this issue, for discussion of a similar slippage). But there is method in these errors: the rst protects the assumption that drama is nonnarrative, the second attens the communicative structure of ctional texts to a single-level contact between author and reader, creating the direct relationship between textual elements and real-life illocutions that can then (and only then) be explained in speech-act theoretical terms. Ignoring the possibility of a text-internal narrating instance, Genette also ignores another earlier speech-act account which offers a perceptive glimpse into the complex communicational structure of ctional texts. Although initially also proceeding on a speech-act based pretense model

narrative voice and agency in drama

669

of ction, Richard Ohmann eventually comes to the conclusion that the perspicuous necessary condition of a work of ction is that it leads the reader to imagine a speaker, a situation, a set of ancillary events (SA 14). In this readerly construction of a quotational relationship between real-world author and imaginary ctional speaker the pretense formula loses much of its foothold. Indeed, when Shannon and Weavers mathematical model of communication started to register in the humanitiesroughly from the 1970s onwardsthe speech-act approach to ction had to face a powerful rival that avoided the categorical errors identied above and began to explain things more adequately.24

IV. Fictional Communication and the Dramatic Narrator

In Story and Discourse, Chatman presents his own model of ctional communication distinguishing three levels: author-reader, implied author-implied reader, and narrator-narratee (SD 151). Signicantly, Chatmans discussion of speech-act theory (SD 16166) is not concerned with dening ction, and he nds no need to mention any pretended speech acts. Later, in Coming to Terms,25 the same model is used to redene the concept of narrative agency and to design a new taxonomy of text types (CTT 115). The rst branches in this taxonomy separate narrative from nonnarrative texts; the narrative types are then divided into diegetic narratives comprising novel, epic, and short story, and mimetic narratives comprising movies, cartoons, and plays. Justifying his design, Chatman rst emphasizes that plays and novels are narrative objects of a roughly comparable order: Plays and novels share the common features of a chrono-logic of events, a set of characters, and a setting. Therefore, at a fundamental level they are all stories. The fact that one kind of story is told (diegesis) and the other shown (mimesis) is of secondary importance. By secondary I do not mean that the difference is inconsequential. It is just that it is lower in the hierarchy of text distinctions . . . (CTT 117). More specically, it is the doubly temporal logic of the narrative genres that turns them into narratological objects: As has been clearly established in recent narratology, what makes Narrative unique among the text-types is its chrono-logic, its doubly temporal logic. Narrative entails movement through time not only externally (the duration of the presentation of the novel, lm, play) but also internally (the duration of the sequence of events that constitute the plot). The rst operates in that dimension of narrative called Discourse (or rcit or syuzhet), the second in that called Story (histoire or fabula) (CTT 9). On the whole, Chatman makes a convincing

670

new literary history

move to overcome structuralist genre theorys almost exclusive focus on differences and differential denitions. As can be seen, under the appropriate mind set, crucial commonalities get the upper hand, and indeed the narrative quality of drama is now accepted by many postGenettean critics.26 However, while the story dimension of a play readily submits to a story-narratological or deep structural treatment, it remains an unsettled issue so far whether drama should also fall under the sway of what Thomas Pavel has termed discourse narratology,27 the discipline that theorizes narrative acts and narrative situations, modes of presentation, and the functions of narratorial voice. The key question here is whether text and performance admit of Chatmans broad concept of narrative agency (CTT 113). In order to develop this concept, Chatman abandons an earlier approach in which narrators were recognized as relatively overt speakers only, excluding them from the performance genres, and from certain kinds of epic narratives as well (SD 16695). Acting on a widespread critique of the narratorless model,28 Chatman now considers even a maximally covert narrator a presence rather than an absence. This opens the door to positing a cinematic narrator as a structural element of all lms, and, by analogy, to similarly constituted narrative agents in all of the other performance genres, including drama. Ultimately the question of narrative agency in drama boils down to whether a plays narrative agent (CTT 119) shows up as an overt teller gure (like, say, Gower in Pericles, Tom in The Glass Menagerie, or the Stage Manager in Our Town), or remains an impersonal, covert show-er or arranger function. Chatmans extended concept of narrative agency is crucially based on functional and organizational rather than purely linguistic or textual criteria. In Chatmans model, the narrator need not speak at all and may have no voice at all. As Richard Aczel points out in the essay that triggered the present set of contributions, structural elements such as organization and arrangement (rather than explicit linguistic markers) are integral to the act of narrating itself.29 Hence, functionally, the narrator is not so much the one who answers to Genettes question who speaks? or who betrays herself or himself by using the rst-person pronoun but the agent who manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how it is to be told (especially, from what point of view, and in what sequence), and what is to be left out. Of course, this is not to deny that a narrator will often overtly speak or write, establish communicative contact with addressees, defend the tellability of the story and comment on its lesson, purpose, or message. In fact, all of this is true of the narrator who appears at the beginning of Pericles, a prototypical epic drama in Psters terms (TAD 69):

narrative voice and agency in drama Enter Gower as Prologue.

GOWER To sing a Song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come, Assuming mans inrmities To glad your ear and please your eyes. It has been sung at festivals, On ember-eves and holy-ales, And lords and ladies in their lives Have read it for restoratives. The purchase is to make men glorious; Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius. If you, born in these latter times, When wits more ripe, accept my rhymes, And that to hear an old man sing May to your wishes pleasure bring, I life would wish, and that I might Waste it for you like taper-light. This Antioch, then; Antiochus the Great Built up this city for his chiefest seat, The fairest in all Syria. I tell you what mine authors say. ... What now ensues, to th judgment of your eye I give, my cause who best can justify. Exit.30

671

Introducing himself as a narrator gure on the communicative level of ctional mediation, Gower exerts an uncommon amount of what Helmut Bonheim terms narratorial conative solicitude:31 he addresses the audience, shows off with a Latin quote, advertises the storys didactic purpose as well as its proven entertainment value, adds some verbal decor which establishes story-HERE and story-NOW, and nally asks the spectators to see and judge for themselves. Later in the play, Gower reappears as a perceptive moderator who introduces each of the remaining acts and eventually speaks the epilogue, closing the plays mediating frame. As long as he is physically present, he is an overt narrator, and in the scenes in which he is physically absent, he is the behind-the-scene show-er agency in control of selection, arrangement, and presentation. Basically, then, an absolute drama (Psters default type of play) is like an epic play without overt (but not without covert) narratorial presence; or, putting it more simplistically still, like Pericles without the gure of Gower but not without the function of Gower. In this conceptual framework a narrator can be said to have a voice only when s/he has speeches of his or her own, that is when s/he is the manifest

672

new literary history

enunciator of diegetic and descriptive statements or of commentatorial discourse. What has been said so far goes for a performance of Pericles. The text itself, more specically, the secondary text passages comprising stage directions and speech prexes (speaker identication tags), reductive as they are, create a notable complication. As Chatman is quick to argue, there is no difference between a sentence in a novel like John left the room and the playwrights instruction to an actor to exit, stage left (CTT 118)a statement that radically contradicts Genettes analysis (quoted above) of Hernani removes his coat.32 Clearly, however, Chatmans argument for the common nature of epic and dramatic narrative allows one to go a step further. As was argued above, a plays text must be read and understood as a piece of narrative ction before it may be used as (and possibly turns into) a recipe for performance containing instructions by the playwright.33 Ryan explains this from a more dedicated narratological vantage: the reader treats the [dramatic] text as if it were narrative ction. . . . Stage directions are processed as descriptive statements, and the speech of characters is regarded as directly quoted dialogue (PW 87).34 Indeed, the pressure of our model forces us to assume that the enunciating subject of the stage directions is not (or at least not initially) the playwright but a narrator,35 that is, in the case of Pericles, another narrator. Not at all conforming to the disqualicatory connotations of a secondary text, the stage directions now constitute a controlling frame, while Gowers discourse acquires the status of an inset, to use the concepts of Meir Sternbergs quotation theory.36 Apparently, thenI am saying this with due hesitationour model must provide a systemic slot not only for Gower as the rst-degree narrator of the plays story, but for the quotationally superordinate narrative agent of the stage directions who shadows Gowers rst-degree narrative with a rst-degree narrative of his/her/its own. I am doing my best to put this as concisely as possible; at the same time, I will readily admit that we are facing a crux which may well require either more adequate exposition or an entirely different model. In the absence of the latter, let me note in support of a literary rstdegree narrator that a plays secondary text can of course acquire a far more personal voice than the matter-of-fact voice that pronounces the rudimentary stage directions of Pericles. Bernard Shaws stage directions are usually cited as cases in point; consider the following, which comes with an explicit rst-person (plural) self-reference:37 We misuse our laborers horribly; and when a man refuses to be misused, we have no right to say that he is refusing honest work. Let us be frank in this matter before we go on with our play; so that we may enjoy it without hypocrisy. 38 There is no stylistic feature here (certainly not the italics) that marks this as being part of a

narrative voice and agency in drama

673

stage direction, and similar passages (that is, passages not explicitly referring to our play) could just as easily have come from a Shavian essay or from a nineteenth-century novel mediated by an intrusive authorial narrator. For another excursion into the realm of genre indeterminacies, compare Shaws stage direction with the following passage:
The room is as long as an open eld. You could shoot a bow here. You could run a footrace. Indeed at the far end the two young ladies and the Germans, Ambassador and the brother of the Duke, are playing a game of shuttlecock. There are one dozen windowsoutdoing by one the windows Queen Elizabeth set into the gallery at Hampton Court, and these more perfectly symmetrical and larger too. And four of these are bay windows, each with covered seats and cushions, facing four large replaces all aglow with the ames and colored smokes of scented woods, each a different composition upon the theme of re.

This looks and reads like an elaborate stage direction but actually is a passage from a novel (what may tip one off here is the obvious difculty, for a producer, to realize an affordable mise en scne).39 Although both of the preceding excerpts have been presented out of context, they do illustrate how genre-typical modes of presentation can operate at each others service, to use the concept of textual service developed by Chatman (CTT 10). Specically discussing the historical emergence of autonomous (unperformable, unrealizable) stage directions,40 Patricia A. Suchy observes that [s]tage directions seem to be assuming, with increasing frequency in the modern drama, many of the characteristics of the ctive discourse of other genres; most notably, of the novel. If the voice that tells the performer to bring down the curtain to see if it works speaks in ctive discourse, then the voice that utters these words emanates less from an author than from an authors imaginary, and quite ctive, narrator (WWC 80). Suchy also cites modern stage directions which employ a mode of reectorization, that is, the stylistic approximation of a narrators and a characters discourse (WWC 77). 41 Of course, in studies of epic narratives, it has always been a tradition to use the terms scene and stage direction in order to describe a camera-eye kind of style (CTT 118). However, the preceding considerations seem to suggest that there is a whole area of functional genre correspondences, including mutual crossover techniques of dramatization and epicalization, that merits closer exploration. For a step in this direction, let us assume that the formal combination of stage directions, speech prexes, and speeches constitutes a recognizable narrative mode called a playscript mode. While the term playscript, along with ready-made analogues such as lmscript, radioscript, and so

674

new literary history

forth, can be used to explicitly separate the performance genres from their printed (readable) versions, the term playscript mode usefully identies a more general style that one also encounters in, for example, transcripts of interviews, panel discussions, meetings, and trials. What may be especially instructive for the purposes of narratological analysis is the use of the playscript mode in novels (examples that come to mind are Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, the Circe episode in Ulysses, and chapter 25 of Doctor Faustus), and, conversely, the use of epic narrative modes in both dramatic text and performance.42 Clearly, any analysis of the systematic tensions that result from such utilizations of exogenic modes and corpora aliena requires a circumspect and genre-conscious narratological framework.

V. Conclusions
The present essay has attempted to lay out the foundations for a model of this kind. Part of the strategy pursued here was to escape from the differences xation and the exclusionary tactics of both the speechact accounts of ction and of classical narratology. Differences must be recognized in order to address a genres specicity, but differences should not keep one from recognizing relevant commonalities. Chatman is right in emphasizing the narrative nature of drama and the applicability of narratology. Plays have a narrative world (a diegesis), which is not distinct in principle from any other narrative world. They have a story and a plot, and even if they do not literally tell their story, tellability and experientiality are dramatic criteria as well as epic ones. Moreover, as Chatman rightly points out, plays have the double chronology of all narrative presentations (but should the duration of a performance really be called discourse time, one wonders), and they admit of the usual temporal manipulations (anachronies). Evidently, too, plays present modal restrictions of narrative information; hence what a play lets the audience see and hear can be treated under the heading of focalization, something that has already been done in lm studies.43 Psychological plays such as memory plays and dream plays clearly employ characters fullling the role of internal focalizers. Of course, one of the main points that was argued here was that all narrative genres are structurally mediated by a rst-degree narrative agency which, in a performance, may either take the totally unmetaphorical shape of a vocally and bodily present narrator gure (a scenario that is unavailable in written epic narrative), or be a disembodied voice in a printed text, or remain an anonymous and impersonal narrative function in charge of selection, arrangement, and focalization. The playscript itself can no

narrative voice and agency in drama

675

longer be treated as a past or future projection of a theatrical performance; rather, it must be accepted as a readable medium sui generis. For this reason, the following diagram extends Chatmans taxonomy of text types to include separate positions for scripted and performed genres: In this taxonomy, the term genres is used rather than Chatmans text

types because our model crucially relies on retaining a strict distinction between text and performance, and hence on a narrower-than-usual conception of text as a purely verbal medium.44 For roughly the same reason, the categories written/printed versus performed are preferred over Chatmans problematic opposition of diegetic and mimetic types (epic narratives are not in general devoid of mimetic elements). Both scripts and performances are now explicitly assigned separate slots in the hierarchy; and I have added a double-headed arrow to emphasize their special relationship. While I will condently claim that this design opens the door to explaining more things more adequately, it would be imprudent to overlook some potentially fatal dangers. For one thing, the model seems to multiply categories unnecessarily; in particular, without the benet of the argument offered above, many people will maintain (and not without cause) that stage directions issue from the playwright rather than from a ctional speaker who has no bodily existence in a performance. Hence while our model forces us to include a separate narrative agent slot in the drama frame, we must account for the fact that readers, theater practitioners, and spectators will often either leave this slot uninstantiated or else instantiate it with the person of the author herself or himself. Evidently, too, there are ways and means, both in dramatic and in epic narrative, of letting the narrative agency stand back, cover its traces, and rene itself out of existence. Such vanishing

676

new literary history

acts may either create the well-attested effet de rel of much modern(ist) ction, or perhaps serve as a destabilizing device.45 It would be fatal if our modela professedly cognitive modelsuggested that these effects were counterfactual gments of the readerly imagination, hallucinations that could be overcome by inspecting the hard facts of the text. As Erving Goffman points out, in order to attend to the what of a ctional world, we have both the capacity and the willingness (perhaps even the obligation) to disattend the puppeteer, the ventriloquist, the director, the stage manager.46 Nevertheless, sometimes it is also important to attend to the machinery of the dramatic or epic frame and its narrative situation, and this is where the dramatic narrator usefully swims into focus even if s/he is otherwise just a bodiless and voiceless show-er or arranger function indistinguishable from the author. Given the techniques of delegation, quotation, and focalization through other minds, we clearly need to carefully calibrate Chatmans conception of narratorial agency. The potential bonus is obvious, however: if we succeed we will have a concept that allows us to address more adequately a text or a performances strategies of characterization and persuasion. So, even if the present account does not solve all relevant problems, even if it creates problems of its own, the benets are tangible ones. Just as drama theory stands to gain from putting the narratological toolbox to work, narratology will benet from letting the subversive inuence of what is commonly regarded as an exception to the narrative model trigger a revision of concepts, a revision that is necessary to keep the discipline alive and kicking. University of Cologne
NOTES 1 Harold Pinter, Introduction: Writing for the Theatre, in Pinter: Plays One (London, 1976), p. 9. 2 Sidney Siegel, Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (London, 1956), p. 9. 3 The phrase is used by Brian McHale in Unspeakable Sentences, Unnatural Acts: Linguistics and Poetics Revisited, Poetics Today, 4 (1983), 22. 4 Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (New York, 1982), p. 7. 5 Brian Richardson, Time is out of joint: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama, Poetics Today, 8.2 (1987), 299309; and Pinters Landscape and the Boundaries of Narrative, Essays in Literature, 18 (1991), 3745. 6 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); hereafter cited in text as IT; and Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Practical Change (Oxford, 1995), chapter 2. 7 Quoted in James Redmond, The minds eye, the worthy scaffold, the real thing: how to read a Shakespeare play, Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception, ed. Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 5758.

narrative voice and agency in drama

677

8 John Priestley, Introduction, The Plays of John B. Priestley (London, 1948), p. vii. 9 J. L. Styan, Drama, Stage and Audience (Cambridge, 1975). 10 The term secondary text is due to Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, tr. George G. Grabowitz (Evanston, 1973), chapter 30. 11 Michael Issacharoff, Discourse as Performance (Stanford, 1989), p. 4; herafter cited in text as DP. 12 Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London, 1980); Manfred Pster, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge, 1984); hereafter cited in text as TAD; and Scolnicov and Holland, ed., Reading Plays (see note 7). 13 Sue Ellen Campbell, Krapps Last Tape and Critical Theory, Comparative Drama, 12 (1987), 187. 14 For a more detailed denition of these positions, see my Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology, Poetics Today, 18 (1997), 44168, and Speak, friend, and enter: Garden Paths, Articial Intelligence, and Cognitive Narratology, in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Ohio, 1999), pp. 16794. 15 Cited in Playwright Versus Director, ed. Jeane Luere (Westport, Conn., 1994), p. 24. 16 John Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford, 1962), pp. 2122; hereafter cited in text as HTD ; John R. Searle, The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse, New Literary History, 6 (1975), 31932 (reprinted in his Expression and Meaning [Cambridge, 1979], pp. 5875); hereafter cited in text as TLS; Richard Ohmann, Speech Acts and the Denition of Literature, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 4 (1971), 119; hereafter cited in text as SA; Grard Genette, in Acts of Fiction, Fiction and Diction, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), pp. 3053 (originally published as Le statut pragmatique de la ction narrative, Poetique, 78 [1989], 23749); hereafter cited in text as AOF. 17 See Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, chapter 11, for a critical discussion of the notion of normal circumstances. 18 For two recent accounts on ofine thinking and mental spaces, see Derek Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior (Seattle, 1995) and Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 19 Patricia A. Suchy, When Words Collide: The Stage Direction as Utterance, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 6.1 (1991), 76; hereafter cited in text as WWC. 20 Grard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); hereafter cited in text as NDR. 21 See Stanton B. Garner, The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater (Urbana, Ill., 1989). 22 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978), pp. 3132, 146; hereafter cited in text as SD. 23 The inherent contradiction becomes explicit when, in a later essay of the same collection, Genette reserves the formula A = N (author = narrator) for the schema of factual narrative (Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative, Fiction and Diction, p. 72). 24 Chatman mentions three 1950s studies already distinguishing between authors and speakers (Story and Discourse, p. 147). In Germany, Rolf Fieguths Zur Rezeptionslenkung bei narrativen und dramatischen Werken, Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, 47 (1971), 186 201, is usually cited as the standard exposition. See Ansgar Nnning, Grundzge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der erzhlerischen Vermittlung: Die Funktion der Erzhlinstanz in den Romanen George Eliots (Trier, 1989) for an extended narratological application of this model. For an explicit rejection of the pretense model on the strength of the embedded ctional discourse model see Flix Martnez-Bonati, Fictive Discourse and the Structure of Literature, tr. Philip W. Silver (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), p. 81; also Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, 1999), pp. 12527.

678

new literary history

25 Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1990); hereafter cited in text as CTT. 26 See, for instance, Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Articial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington, 1991), pp. 8788; hereafter cited in text as PW; Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology (London, 1996), pp. 34953; hereafter cited in text as TNN. 27 Thomas G. Pavels term is introduced in his book The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama (Minneapolis, 1985), pp. 1415. 28 See especially the forceful argument raised against Ann Baneld by Brian McHale in Unspeakable Sentences, Unnatural Acts; see also Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, pp. 12730. The concluding paragraphs of this essay offer a compromise proposal. Note, too, that a version of the narratorless model is retained in Fluderniks article in this issue. 29 Richard Aczel, Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts, New Literary History, 29 (1998), 492. 30 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1988), 1.120, 4142. 31 Helmut Bonheim, Conative Solicitude and the Anaphoric Pronoun in the Canadian Short Story, Sprachtheorie und Angewandte Linguistik: Festschrift fr Alfred Wollmann, ed. Werner Welte (Tbingen, 1982), p. 77. 32 But is it right? How is one to account for the fact that epic diegetic statements, unlike stage directions, can appear in the past tense and in the rst person? 33 For a similar argument see Marvin Carlson, The Status of Stage Directions, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 24.2 (1991), 42, and further references there. 34 Of course, Ryans use of the term descriptive statement invites the same critique that was leveled against Genette, above. 35 See Suchys When Words Collide and Carlsons The Status of Stage Directions for more reasons for positing a narrator as the speaker of the stage directions. 36 Meir Sternberg, Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse, Poetics Today, 3 (1982), 10756. 37 For an excellent account of Shavian epicalization strategies, see Redmond, The minds eye, and E. A. Levenston, Shaws Stage Directions, in Scolnicov and Holland, Reading Plays, pp. 20615. 38 Bernard Shaw, initial stage direction to Act 3 of Man and Superman, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw (London, 1971), p. 615. 39 George Garrett, The Death of the Fox (New York, 1971), p. 494; see Fluderniks essay in this issue for a detailed discussion of this text. 40 For the term autonomous stage direction, see Issacharoff, Discourse as Performance, chapter 3 (Reading Stage Directions). A typical example cited by Suchy is The curtain is lowered and raised to see if it works, from Ring Lardners Cora or Fun at a Spa (Suchy, When Words Collide, 75); this example is also referred to in the following quote. 41 See also Fluderniks essay in this issue. 42 See Fludernik (Towards a Natural Narratology, pp. 35053) for a discussion of a number of pertinent examples. 43 This presumably requires the framework of post-Genettean focalization theory as sketched in my Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept (Style, 30 [1996], 24167) and More Aspects of Focalization: Renements and Applications (Publications des Groupes de Recherches Anglo-Amricaines de lUniversit Franois Rabelais, 21 [1999], 6384). For the lmic analogy see Celestino Deleyto, Focalisation in Film Narrative in Narratology: An Introduction, ed. Susana Onega and Jos Angel Garca Landa (London, 1996), pp. 21733; and Franois Jost, Loeil camra: Entre lm et roman (Lyon, 1989). 44 Although many drama theorists use terms like dramatic text, theatrical text, performance text, dramatic discourse, and text of the production with reference to

narrative voice and agency in drama

679

the performance, this constitutes a category error under the present set of assumptions. The debilitating side effects of using this broad meaning of text become obvious when theorists declare that two sets of reading go on: the dramatic text is read on the page, the theatrical text is read by an audience from the stage (Mick Wallis and Simon Shepherd, Studying Plays [London, 1998], p. 7). 45 For a comment on the destabilizing uses of nonnarrated modes, see Christine BrookeRose, Narrating Without a Narrator, Times Literary Supplement, 4058 (31 December 1999), 1213. 46 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston, 1986), p. 207.